


the hospital illuminates itself   imaginary walls collapse

by Wolvesandwerewolves



Series: I’m With You in Rockland [12]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Halloween, Schizophrenia, Schizophrenia/Schizoaffective Disorder, mental health
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:01:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26023087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolvesandwerewolves/pseuds/Wolvesandwerewolves
Summary: Klaus finally gets to leave the hospital. He and Vanya finally talk.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves
Series: I’m With You in Rockland [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1865728
Comments: 19
Kudos: 147





	the hospital illuminates itself   imaginary walls collapse

**Author's Note:**

> sup this is a long one and as usual it is late and i am tired.
> 
> idk what this is but here ya go fam 
> 
> there’s a bit of talk about the possible triggers that surround halloween for people who have mental health issues or ptsd. mostly just bc I absolutely love halloween and i even like the creepy gross parts of it but i never thought about it from someone else’s pov before.  
> it made me think and i hope it makes u think. doesn’t mean you have to feel bad if u like those parts. i still personally think fake gore is fascinating but i also recognize that for some people its not and I try to respect that. anyways idk what im trying to say. uhhh love you i guess

They make him wear socks and shoes when he leaves.

It’s almost distracting and sort of annoying. His toes feel squished together inside his shoes, and there are fuzzies clinging in between them that he can’t stop noticing. His feet feel bulky, too warm and too heavy. His skin is suffocating inside. But it’s still such a small thing, and everything else is so huge and looming around him. 

He has to stop, right outside the exit, and take a moment to soak everything in.

The cold air seems to smack him right in the face when he walks outside. 

It’s so fresh. Thin, almost, but not in a bad way. More like it’s just easier to take in. It feels like he’s breathing for the for time since he was admitted. Even before that, too, probably. The air in that trashy hotel was stale and heavy. Like pollution, it felt grimy in his throat, sticky on his skin. And even in the hospital, it was sickly sweet, too recycled and close to artificial.

But he’s outside again, and the wind flushes cool against his face. He takes a deep breath and feels almost giddy, somewhere close to lightheaded. He has goosebumps underneath his sweatshirt, almost too aware of them, he feels them as they brush against the rough fabric. His skin feels like static, buzzing excitedly with his heartbeat.

He wishes Ben could feel this. 

“I’m never going inside again,” Klaus says.

Vanya smiles at him and laughs. It floats around him in the air not unlike his hallucinations of moths and voices—but it’s so different from then. 

He missed her so much. Even when she visited he missed her. 

He squeezes her hand. Vanya squeezes back.

Ben looks like he’s trying not smirk. He raises one eyebrow at him. “I’m not sleeping on the porch with you.”

He grins, opens his mouth to finally retort back, but then swallows his voice. Vanya is right here. He can’t talk to someone she can’t see. Breakthrough symptoms are normal, even expected since he’s on a different medication, but interacting with them, acting like they’re real, isn’t. Even if he knows Ben isn’t a hallucination, no one else does.

They’re not even two feet away from the entrance of the hospital. 

Ben seems to read his mind. “I think she knows,” he says. His voice isn’t teasing anymore, it’s reassuring, but Klaus still wants to chase that mocking tone. “You should tell her, though. When we’re home.”

_I thought you weren’t telepathic,_ he thinks, sarcastic to no one but himself. He wants to stick his tongue out at his brother, maybe grin and flip him off for good measure. 

Instead he hugs Vanya again. 

Her hair tickles at his neck. Her breath ghosts over the bones of his clavicle, crawls under the thick material of his sweatshirt. He wraps his arms around her, tucks her head just under his chin and closes his eyes. 

“Missed you,” he says, out loud this time. 

Vanya laughs again, but this time it sounds bubbly, like she’s under water. She cried the last time she picked him up, too. They both did. And when they were kids, too, and he got back home after weeks, he found her red-eyed, playing the violin in his bedroom, waiting for him. He’s always making her cry. 

“I missed you,” she says. She sniffs, and when she pulls away she wipes at her eyes.

She doesn’t scold him for putting them through this, again. She doesn’t ask him never to do anything like it again. They both know it might be a promise he won’t be able to keep, even if he wants to. 

But he still says it, anyway. Or at least, what he can, and he knows Vanya will understand he means so much more. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” Ben says, immediately. And then he says, “I’m sorry, too.”

I know, Klaus thinks, even though it isn’t Ben’s fault. Maybe it’s not even his own fault. Guilt still rises in his stomach like bile, all the same. He can’t help it.

But Vanya just grabs his hand again and squeezes. “Okay,” she says. “I know. Do you want to walk home? Or drive with the windows down? I’m—I’m okay with either,” she says, and sniffs again, brushing hair away from her face. 

He wants to walk. Desperately. He wants to take his shoes off, feel the rough, gritty texture of the pavement beneath his feet. The gravely areas on the sidewalk might irritate the scars on his soles, but he thinks even that might be nice. Better than the sticky fuzziness of his socks, and the gross rubbery feel of the gripped pattern on the bottom. He wants to feel the crunch of the leaves beneath his bare feet. 

But it also sounds so exhausting. And so long. As much as he wants all that, he also wants to strip down, get away from all the boring, too soft clothes he’s been wearing too much lately. He wants to stand in the shower in his own bathroom, and let the steam fog up the mirror so he can draw a smiley face with his finger. He wants to wear a skirt, just because he can, even if he’s not going anywhere, and put on one of his long sleeved cropped tops and eyeliner for the same reason. 

And he wants to be alone, with Vanya, and tell her all of the secrets he’s been keeping lately. Tell her he’s sorry, again. 

And besides. It’s almost Halloween. They’re bound to walk past decorations on their way home. Fake cobwebs, wrapped around trees. Giant spiders, and he’s tired of bugs. Fake ghosts, or fake graves, mocking of the real ones he’s far too familiar with. 

At their old apartment, on a house across the block from them, dried, boney hands with ugly, wrinkled skin rose up out of the dirt, ready to grab at ankles like they did in his childhood. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe that was a hallucination, not a memory. It’s hard to sort through all the horrors of his mind. 

It always has been.

And he was right, last night, when he thought to himself that he wouldn’t be released until hours after the set time. It’s a little past three, now. Friday. Kids will be getting out of school, soon, and he knows from the years before, they all dress up the day closest to the holiday. The younger kids are cute, dressed up as their favorite heroes—Spider-Man or Wonder Woman, or even one of his own siblings from the Academy, which always feels odd. 

But he has seen too many teenagers dressed up as himself, mocking and maybe even unknowingly cruel. Dirty, loose straight jackets, gags over their mouths like the misrepresentations on tv. Too-dark makeup, wide eyes and joyful laughter. _Insane Asylum Inmate 41_ written on their t-shirts. Black tears streaked down their faces. Fake, bloody knives or other weapons, wielded poorly in small hands as they run after their friends, because the ‘crazy’ people are always scary and violent. Santa Sangre. The Fisher King. People nothing like him, representing him nonetheless.

Klaus hates Halloween. None of it should bother him—he’s old enough to not care what others think, usually. And kids are allowed to dress up as whoever they want to. People are allowed to decorate how they want. And of course they would try to make it scary—that’s entire holiday. He gets it. 

He’s just not in the mood for dealing with it. 

“Let’s drive,” he says. 

“Okay,” Vanya says. She gets it. He knows she does.

“Okay,” Ben says. He probably gets it, too. From his own bloody version of their childhood, not tinted by mental illness but maybe trauma instead. And the past month he spent with Klaus, and all the other patients that were just ordinary people, too.

But he still wants to feel the texture of the sidewalk beneath his feet. So he lets go of his sister’s hand, toes his shoes off and shoves each sock inside them. He breathes a sigh of relief, holds them by their laces and lets them swing and dangle against his legs. 

He grabs Vanya’s hand again, and they walk to the car. He sets his bag in the trunk as Ben slips inside to sit in the backseat. He takes the passenger side, closes his eyes and sighs as he rolls the window down. 

_The Devil’s Trill_ plays on the cassette radio of the car. Wind tangled through the curls of his hair. Behind him, Ben sighs and hums. 

“You should tell her,” he says, quietly. He almost sounds nervous. “And tell her I missed her, too.”

Klaus smiles. He keeps his eyes closed. But Ben is right, and he’s stayed by Klaus’s side for ten whole months, now. He stayed the entire time when Klaus was scared and so, so tired. He never even left the hospital, not even at night when he was sleeping, because he’d wake up from a nightmare and Ben would be there, calmly saying facts he sometimes already knew. 

And they’ve lived their entire lives being lied to. Ben deserves to be known. Vanya deserves to know herself completely, every part of herself unless she decides, like him, that she’d rather be ordinary. 

But she deserves to make that decision for herself. Neither Klaus nor their father has the right to hide that from her. 

He takes a deep breath, opens his eyes and looks over at Vanya. He grabs hold of her hand, warm in his.

“I think I have powers,” he says. 

Vanya purses her lips. She squeezes his hand. “I know,” she says. He remembers Ben telling him, in the hospital, about the way his hands glowed and how Diego and Vanya both screamed. He remembers asking why his chest hurt, and not liking the answer. “Is Ben here?”

Klaus glances over his shoulder. Ben smiles halfheartedly at him and waves. 

“He says hi.” 

She chuckles. She glances back in the rear view mirror, like she’s expecting to see him sitting there, now that she knows he’s a ghost. 

“Hi, Ben. Thanks for . . . hanging out,” she says. 

“Yeah,” Ben says, like he’s not sure what else to say. 

Klaus hesitates. He clears his throat and turns back to his sister. “I think you do, too.”

Vanya shakes her head. Her voice sounds watery again. “Yeah. I haven’t stopped taking my pills, yet.”

He thinks of how awful it is every time he stops taking his own. He thinks of how excited he was that night he made the decision. Maybe it’s better to be wary. 

“You don’t have to,” he says, and he says it at the same time as Ben. 

“I think I want to,” she admits. Klaus nods. “But I’m scared. I’m afraid I’ll be horrified—or maybe disappointed.” 

“It’s okay,” Ben says. “We’ll help you through it, if you want.”

_Just like Ben helped Klaus, every day since he died_. Just like Vanya has been there for him, every single day of their childhood and as they grew into adulthood. 

“We’ll be here,” Klaus says. He squeezes her hand. 

Vanya squeezes back. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Howl by Allen Ginsberg 
> 
> goodnight fam i love you and goodnight xoxo 
> 
> this post sponsored yet again by NyQuill
> 
> oh yeah klaus was originally going to be smoking on the car ride home but i ~forgot~ Oops
> 
> Edit: for some reason, at least on my end, this is saying it’s the last of the series but uhhh it’s not. click on the series title and scroll down for chapter 13 ok thanks love you guys


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